Are Online Courses Democratizing Education or Killing Colleges?

By

Shira Ovide

Oct 28, 2014 4:01 pm ET

There’s a debate whether a recent boom in online-university courses democratizes higher education, or provides a playground for the wealthy. Both a supporter and a sometime critic of online courses had the same message on Tuesday: Commuter and community colleges may get squeezed as the Web increasingly becomes alternative to traditional courses.

If massive open online courses, or MOOCs, become more prevalent “all of a sudden you have a new reverse digital divide,” Gene Block, the chancellor of the University of California in Los Angeles, said at the WSJD Live global technology conference.

He said that students from wealthy families will continue to send their children to residential four-year colleges, where they learn in the classroom, and in interactions among students and between students and faculty. But community colleges or other non-residential higher-educational institutions are at risk of getting usurped by the MOOCs, he said.